Off kilter, discordant, contemporary...and utterly original.
Brit Bunkley | New Zealand | 01/25/2005
(5 out of 5 stars)
"This album is a wonderfully addition to the current underground weird folk movement. (This neo-psychedelic phenomenon includes the acoustic T. Rex stylisms of Devendra Banhart, the Incredible String Band meets Jean Ritchie approach of Joanna Newsom, and the post modern Beach Boys-on-far-too-many-acid-trips technique of the Animal Collective.) In this case, the folk is... mostly folk-rock.
The front cover of "All the Leaves Are Gone" is a reasonable pastiche of late 60's psychedelia; it could easily pass for a Fillmore West poster from 1969. However the style of the lead singer Josephine Foster's operatic voice not only seems to emerge from the West Coast late sixties; it is far more eclectic. At times the vocals and song arrangements resemble the 1979 folkish post punk of the Raincoats. Other times Foster's voice could pass for Joan Baez. References to the 1969 period Renaissance, It's a Beautiful Day and the "Unhalbricking" era Fairport Convention would also be accurate, but in all, the music is also off kilter, discordant, contemporary...and utterly original.
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